Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: reading level, length and free edition

Name: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Author: Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is a children’s novel in English. Our team rates it B2. It runs to 26,775 words with 2,634 different word forms, about 2–4.5 h of reading at 200 to 100 words per minute, and it is free from Project Gutenberg.

By the Readlang Mobile team (an independent app, not affiliated with readlang.com). Updated 31 October 2026.

Cover of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Author: Lewis Carroll
Language: English
Level: B2
Form: children’s novel
Words: 26,775
Different word forms: 2,634
Forms for 95% / 98%: 1,399 / 2,099
Reading time: 2–4.5 h
Free edition: Project Gutenberg

"Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll is a children’s novel published in 1865. It follows a young girl named Alice who tumbles down a rabbit hole into a fantastical world populated by peculiar anthropomorphic creatures. This groundbreaking work of literary nonsense plays with logic and language, delighting readers of all ages. The story helped transform children’s literature from didactic lessons to pure entertainment, establishing a legacy that has influenced fantasy literature and popular culture for over a century.

Is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland right for your level?

To recognise 95% of the running words in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, you need its 1,399 most frequent word forms; for 98%, the share at which most readers manage a novel without a dictionary, 2,099. The median English B2 book in our table needs 3,747 forms for 95%, so by this measure the book is easier than most for its level: number 1 of 19, easiest first.

A word form is any spelling that appears in the text, so “walk” and “walked” count twice, and names count too. These numbers are a guide to how much vocabulary the book asks for, not a test. The level itself was set by hand by our team. Before you commit, read one page of the free edition and count the words you do not know: the one-page test takes two minutes.

Which words should you know before you start?

These are the words that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland uses most often but that are not among the 2,000 most common word forms across all 309 English books in our library; the number is how many times each appears. Names of people and places are left out. Learning a handful of them first makes the opening chapters easier.

jury 22
hastily 16
anxiously 14
baby 14
cats 13
cook 13
dance 13
pool 12
queer 12
hurried 11
hurry 11
gloves 11
croquet 10
lessons 10
bottle 10

How does it begin?

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”

From the Project Gutenberg edition, which is in the public domain. If this paragraph already feels slow, try a book one level lower.

How long does it take to read?

Hours to read *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland* (26,775 words) at four reading speeds.
Words	100 wpm	150 wpm	200 wpm	250 wpm
26,775	4.5 h	3 h	2 h	2 h

Learners reading a book at their level often manage 100 to 150 words per minute, and readers in their first language 200 to 250. Where these speeds come from, and a calculator for your own: How long does it take to read a book?

Where can you read it for free?

The free edition is Project Gutenberg eBook #11. Project Gutenberg publishes books that are in the public domain in the United States, as EPUB, Kindle and plain text, free and without an account. Copyright terms differ by country: if you live outside the United States, check that the book is out of copyright where you are before you download it.

To read it with a translation over every word you tap, open it in Readlang Mobile on iPhone or iPad.